U.S. Film and Television Censorship History

This book is an account of what one industry has learned about governing itself in the form of the Hays Office, or more popularly identified as the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America.

As enforcer of the puritanical Production Code, Breen dictated "final cut" over more movies than anyone in the history of American cinema. Cultural historian Thomas Doherty tells the absorbing story of Breen's ascent to power and the widespread effects of his reign.

"The book includes the full text of the "Code of Fair Competition for the Motion Picture Industry," an Executive Order approved by President Franklin D. Roosevelt in November 1933. For anyone attempting to truly understand the financial and legal workings of the Hollywood studio system during the 1930s, this volume is essential reading."

This text showcases the boldly creative pre-code period in Hollywood in the early 1930s, when defiant producers flouted the restrictions of the censors. Vieira draws on extensive research, interviews, and correspondence in the Production Code Administration files to tell the engaging, suspenseful, and often humorous story of the struggle between Hollywood and its reformers, weaving history, politics, and film into a full-blooded narrative.

On microfilm.

This book details how a religious organisation got control of Hollywood, and how films like A Streetcar Named Desire, Lolita, and Tea and Sympathy were altered by the Legion to make them morally acceptable. Documenting the inner workings of the Legion, The Catholic Crusade against the Movies also examines how the changes in the movie industry, and American society at large in the post-World War II era, eventually conspired against the Legion's power and so lead to its demise.

After a series of sex scandals rocked the film industry in 1922, movie moguls hired Will Hays to clear the image of movies. Hays tried a variety of ways to regulate movies before adopting what became known as the production code. Written in 1930 by a St Louis priest, the code stipulated that movies stress proper behaviour, respect for government, and 'Christian values'. The Catholic Church reinforced these efforts by launching its Legion of Decency in 1934. Intended to force Hays and Hollywood to censor films, the Legion of Decency engineered the appointment of Joseph Breen as head of the Production Code Administration. For the next three decades, Breen, Hays, and the Catholic Legion of Decency virtually controlled the content of all Hollywood films.

Frank Walsh tells how the church's influence in Hollywood grew through the 1920s and reached its peak in the 1930s, when the film industry allowed Catholics to dictate the Production Code, which became the industry's self-censorship system, and the Legion of Decency was established by the church to blacklist any films it considered offensive.

Looks at the film industry's attempts at self-regulation and the development of the present day rating system, also examining how censorship reflects the morals, sexuality and politics prevalent in society during each decade of the past century.

One hundred years of film censorship, encompassing the entire 20th century, are chronicled in this work. The freewheeling nature of films in the early decades was profoundly affected by Prohibition, the Depression and the formation of the Legion of Decency--culminating in a new age of restrictiveness in the movies.

Stephen Prince has written the first book to examine the interplay between the aesthetics and the censorship of violence in classic Hollywood films from 1930 to 1968, the era of the Production Code, when filmmakers were required to have their scripts approved before they could start production. He explains how Hollywood's filmmakers designed violence in response to the regulations of the Production Code and regional censors.

America's foremost film critics discuss sex and violence in the movies, challenging current trends toward censorship. Contains reviews of such films as Pulp Fiction, Henry and June, and Natural Born Killers, promising to raise the level of discourse on this subject.

Movie reviewers, cinematographers, film scholars, psychologists, and sociologists all contribute essays exploring topics such as · the origins and innovations of film violence and attempts to regulate it (from Hollywood’s Production Code to the evolution of the ratings system) · the explosion of screen violence following the 1967 releases of Bonnie and Clyde and The Dirty Dozen, and the lasting effects of those landmark films · the aesthetics of increasingly graphic screen violence · the implications of our growing desensitization to murder and mayhem, from The Wild Bunch to The Terminator.

Providing an account of the Bureau of Motion Pictures over its 19-month life span, this text asserts that the censorship fears of the movie industry led to extensive defensive moves, and the eventual death of the agency was not due to imposed censorship.

Film and Propaganda in America, the largest collection of archival government documents on the subject ever published, includes five volumes of letters, legal documents, and memoranda for the war years. Citations at the head of each document supply name of the author, recipient, date sent, and the collection from which the document is taken, providing a valuable guide to further research. Volumes cover WWI, WWII, and post-1945 - Vietnam War.

Hollywood Goes to War reveals the powerful role played by President Franklin D. Roosevelt's Office of War Information--staffed by some of America's most famous intellectuals including Elmer Davis, Robert Sherwood, and Archibald MacLeish--in shaping the films that were released during the war years. Ironically, it was the film industry's own self-censorship system, the Hays Office and the Production Code Administration, that paved the way for government censors to cut and shape movies to portray an idealized image of a harmonious American society united in the fight against a common enemy.

In exchange for access to sophisticated military hardware and expertise, filmmakers must agree to censorship from the Pentagon. As veteran Hollywood journalist David L. Robb shows in this revealing insider look into Hollywood's "dirtiest little secret," the final product that moviegoers see at the theater is often not just what the director intends but also what the powers-that-be in the military want to project about America's armed forces. Sometimes the censor demands removal of just a few words; other times whole scenes must be scrapped or completely revised.

In 1915, Kansas became one of only a handful of states to establish its own film censorship board. The Kansas board controlled screen content in the state for more than fifty years, yet little is known about its activities. This first book-length study of state film censorship examines the unique political, social, and economic factors that led to its implementation in Kansas, examining why censorship legislation was enacted, what the attitudes of Kansans were toward censorship, and why it lasted for half a century.

Between 1936 and 1955, Hollywood significantly changed its portrayal of Hispanics in motion pictures. This change resulted from the demands of the Production Code Administration, which required film makers to eliminate the more offensive stereotypical Hispanic images. This filmography chronicles all of the Hispanic-related films released during this period. The volume includes entries for nearly four thousand films.

Using original research, this book explores the recurring debates in Britain and America about children and how they use and respond to the media, focusing on a key example: the controversy surrounding children and cinema in the 1930s. It explores the attempts to control children's viewing, the theories that supported these approaches and the extent to which they were successful.

Controversial Cinema: The Films that Outraged America traces the history of controversial films and offers insights into why it is that certain films spark controversies, and how Americans typically react to controversial moviemaking.

The first filmed prizefight, Veriscope's Corbett-Fitzsimmons Fight (1897) became one of cinema's first major attractions, ushering in an era in which hugely successful boxing films helped transform a stigmatized sport into legitimate entertainment. This era of film led to one of the earliest examples of film censorship, starting with the prizefight film ban.

Alphabetically arranged entries offer detailed histories of 125 films, providing production data, cast information, plot summaries, censorship histories, and profiles of directors.

In his award-winning Hitchcock and the Censors, author John Billheimer traces the forces that led to the Production Code and describes Hitchcock's interactions with code officials on a film-by-film basis as he fought to protect his creations, bargaining with code reviewers and sidestepping censorship to produce a lifetime of memorable films.

Miracles and Sacrilege is the story of the epochal conflict between censorship and freedom in film, recounted through an in-depth analysis of the U.S. Supreme Court's decision striking down a government ban on Roberto Rossellini's film The Miracle (1950). The Court's decision was not only a milestone in the law of church-state relations, but it paved the way for a succession of later decisions which gradually established a firm legal basis for freedom of expression in the arts.

The eleven essays in this book examine nearly a century of struggle over cinematic representations of sex, crime, violence, religion, race, and ethnicity, revealing that the effort to regulate the screen has reflected deep social and cultural schisms.